Before starting to read this review of Autre Ne Veut's Body EP, I assume you took a few seconds to investigate the above cover image. It is what you think it is. Not only is it attention-grabbing, it's a good metaphor for the music of this yet-unidentified New York-based artist. You probably wouldn't refer to the extreme close-up of a female sex organ as pornography-- the clinical, uncontextualized presentation is absent any eroticism. Pornography's aim is to provide pleasure, usually presenting the most attractive and desirable package possible. The same is also typically true of pop music, yet Auture Ne Veut is every bit as obstinate as *Body'*s cover about taking pleasure-producing elements and making them raw and discomfiting. In much the same way the photo delivers a view of sex so intimate and vivid it might leave you squeamish, Body's music forswears the niceties of pop and R&B, instead rubbing its squirmingly real feeling in the listener's face.
Body picks up where Autre Ne Veut left off on his terrific 2010 self-titled debut, utilizing pop hooks and R&B declarations predominantly mined from the 1980s, but presenting them as garish and unhinged. The results fleetingly inspire nostalgia, only to warp those comforts into something unsettling and queasy. It's terrain also covered by the likes of How to Dress Well, the Knife, and Ariel Pink: Autre Ne Veut shares those artists' mix of a strongly expressive pop instinct and an arty deconstructionist bent. Starting with disorienting synths and unnerving background vocals, EP opener "Sweetheart" immediately announces its disruptive intentions. Autre Ne Veut's vocals bend and leer drunkenly, sometimes sounding sickeningly sweet or affected, sometimes painfully sincere, as he competes with layers of swirling keyboards and blasted-out beats. It's followed by the lone throwaway of the four cuts, "Not the One", a scant two minutes of guest vocalist She Wolf's single repeated lyric ("This is not the one that you've been promising me") sliced and diced and plied with spooky synths.
That eerie aesthetic carries over on "Just Return", but here Autre Ne Veut complements the horrorshow synths with a gripping tune, powerfully sliding between vocal tones, starting off softly fragile before emoting with real abandon on the refrain, fervently declaring wishes for empowerment and acceptance that only increase curiosity about the man behind this artistic mask. The EP closes with the similarly effusive "Your Clothes", though here the mood is far more playful, with Autre Ne Veut grunting and moaning like an exaggerated R&B loverman over the kind of noisily fun 80s-inspired gallop that Max Tundra is also so good at summoning. Body's over in fewer than 13 minutes, but you feel like you've been on a legitimate ride: Autre Ne Veut almost never lets up pushing messily human pop exclamations forcibly to the forefront.
